Dr Ali Cheetham is a Research Fellow with the Monash Addiction Research Centre and Hamilton Centre, Statewide Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She completed her PhD at The University of Melbourne in 2013, and has worked at Turning Point (Eastern Health) since 2012.

Her contributions to the field of addiction research span a range of areas, including new models of care for opioid dependence, integrated care approaches for co-occurring addiction and mental health disorders, identification of risk factors for substance use problems in adolescence and young adulthood, and addressing barriers to help-seeking for alcohol and other drug problems, including stigma. To date, she has authored >40 peer-reviewed publications in leading addiction and psychiatry and mental health journals, collectively cited >2600 times.

She has experience coordinating large complex projects to inform health system change and the use of hybrid implementation-effectiveness research methods that involve close collaboration with consumer, community, and government stakeholders. Current projects include national scale-up of a pharmacist-prescriber collaborative model of care for Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Dependence (EPIC-MATOD); co-designing a scalable school-based program to facilitate help-seeking for substance use and mental health problems (MAKINGtheLINK); and updating the 2004 Principles for School Drug Education, including a systematic review of the drug education literature and development of a school-based resource and implementation guide.

• Addiction
• Opioids
• Dependence
• Treatment
• Substance use
• Comorbidity